Tomb Kings Diary – Resurrecting the Desiccated Dead (and This Blog)

Hello, brave adventurers, and welcome back to When Cannons Fade. You may have noticed (for the couple of you who read this) that it has been radio silent for a long time. This has been due to (mostly) my lack of inspiration to write anything, and opting instead to posting things on our Instagram page instead. It would seem I’ve fallen foul of the Tik Tok generation’s diminishing attention span – it’s so much easier to post a picture and send it out into the ether in mere seconds versus spending actual time to plan and write out blog posts. Are blogs still a thing? are they still relevant? I hope so, because we’re (me and Matt Crump) going to make a concerted effort to invoke the necessary incantations over this one and reanimate it. The Liche Priests have their work cut out or them, that much is certain. So please bear with us as we work to make this page look a little more snappy over the coming weeks as we’ll be tweaking, adjusting, moving, editing and whatnot. Please pardon our dust…

…Which is a great segue to this series I want to do chronicling the rise of the Tomb Kings army I started a millennia ago, a Return of the Living Dead, if you will (or my ‘Scrolls of Progress’). This summer I will be battling across fields strewn with enemy dead, facing down the wretched forces of Bretonnia, and so I thought it would be a great opportunity to record my journey of getting my long forgotten army back onto the tabletop and actually finished.

It’s no lie that I have been salty for many years that GW dismissively wiped out a vast swathe of their forces when they shut down Warhammer Fantasy Battle and dangled the carrot of new shiny plastic crack in players’ faces with Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. I didn’t by any core rulebooks in the early stages (though I dipped my toe with Daughters of Khaine) and basically stuck a giant middle finger to the company for shafting us. Now I hear cries of ‘well, nothing was stopping you still playing WFB!’ and that is true, but for us Tomb Kings players (I can’t comment on the other nerfed forces), you may remember that the price of the TK minis on the secondary market skyrocketed, and as I hadn’t been able to buy all the units I needed before they shut WFB down, I just thought “screw it”, and away into boxes, cases and dark corners of cupboards they went.

Fast forward to recent times, the murmurs of WFB returning blah blah blah and here we are – Warhammer: The Old World. It’s a snappy title, I’ll give them that. So a good friend of mine decided he wanted to pull together a Bretonnian army and suggested resurrecting my Tomb Kings. I saw that the kits that were previously wallet-wiltingly expensive were now available again, and thought ‘why not’ as I had a good size force already. How much would I need to spend? (Seriously, I can hear your laughter from here). But more on that later down the line.

This is my last hurrah with GW, so I have to make it count. I’ve strayed too far from the path over the last few years by turning to other more satisfying games with lower model counts that don’t churn out new revised rules every three years (AND have alternating activations – WHAAAAAT???). WFB was a big part of my younger years, so this is a trip down memory lane for me, plus I get to field pseudo-Egyptian skeletons and monsters which is pretty cool. Oh, and also, I wrote a song for my band way back when which may or may not have been a little influenced by my army at the time…

“Skies darken as though with ash, air thick with arcane magick. The sands part, like the sea, the earth is torn asunder…”

I’m looking forward to this journey, I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

Paul ‘Hoagy’ Burton